August 29, 2024—The imminent closure of Steward Health Care-owned Carney Hospital, a safety net hospital serving Boston’s southern neighborhoods, threatens to widen the city’s already dramatic health inequities, writes Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health’s Alecia McGregor.
In an August 27 op-ed published in CommonWealth Beacon, McGregor, assistant professor of health policy and politics, detailed the context in which Carney is set to shut. “The southern neighborhoods of Boston are home to the greatest percentage of Black/Latinx Bostonians,” she wrote. “With Carney’s closure, the broad swath of [these] neighborhoods will be without proximate care. Adding insult to injury, the closure comes at a time when communities of color are reeling from worsening health issues”—including a rise in opioid-related deaths, a persistent racial life expectancy gap, and limited access to health facilities. “In Boston, a globally renowned center for academic medicine, this is unacceptable,” McGregor wrote.
She also noted that the closure—planned for August 31—highlights the dangers of a growing nationwide trend in which for-profit systems like Steward buy struggling hospitals in an attempt to save them—then fail to do so. In response, the Massachusetts House and Senate recently passed legislation to increase oversight and tighten regulations over potential hospital buyers—but the legislation did not make it to Governor Maura Healey’s desk.
“With the Legislature stalled, it will take executive action to see the changes necessary,” McGregor wrote. In the meantime, “we must fight like hell to maintain acute inpatient care, emergency services, and behavioral health at the Carney. Swift and compassionate action now is a matter of life and death, especially for our most marginalized communities.”
Read the op-ed: Loss of Carney would accentuate Boston’s health care inequities
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